Light Fell
Evan Fallenberg, 2007
Soho Press
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781569475362
Summary
Twenty years have passed since Joseph left his family and his religious Israeli community when he fell in love with a man, the brilliant rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig. Now, for his fiftieth birthday, Joseph is preparing to have his five sons and the daughter-in-law he has never met spend the Sabbath with him in his Tel Aviv penthouse. This will be the first time he and his sons will have all been together in nearly two decades.
Awarded the 2009 Stonewall Prize for Fiction, the first and most enduring award for GLBT books, sponsored by the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. (From the publisher.)
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The sumptuous meal Joseph Licht prepares in his Tel Aviv beachfront penthouse is even better organized than his customary elegant dinner parties, but then his guests are more special than usual: in honor of his own fiftieth birthday, Joseph will host his five grown sons and his new daughter-in-law for the entire Sabbath.
It is the first time the family will be reunited in twenty years, since the day Joseph left behind his entire life—wife Rebecca, sons, father, the religious moshav where he grew up—in favor of a riveting affair with his soulmate, illui Yoel Rosenzweig, the genius rabbi of his generation. Their love affair has long since ended, but its echoes reverberate over twenty years and into the lives of Joseph, Rebecca, and their sons in ways none of them could have predicted. In this novel of desire and need, of choices and consequences, no one is unaffected. (From the author's website.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Cleveland, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgetown University; M.F.A., Vermont
College
• Awards—Stonewall Prize for Fiction
• Currently—lives in Israel
Evan Fallenberg the author or two books: Light Fell (2008) and When We Danced on Water (2011).
Fallenberg's recent translations include Ron Leshem's Beaufort, Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem, Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and The House of Dajani, and Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy, winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award for fiction and a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Fallenberg is an instructor in the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University and heads his own Studio for Writers (and Readers) of English in the garden of his home. The recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, Fallenberg is the father of two sons.
Fallenberg is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, a graduate of Georgetown University and the MFA program in creative writing at Vermont College. He has lived in Israel since 1985, where he writes, translates and teaches. His first novel, Light Fell, won the American Library Association's Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book Award for Literature and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in fiction and a Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction
Book Reviews
When literature professor Joseph Licht invites his five adult sons to celebrate his 50th birthday in 1996 Tel Aviv, he hopes to win his boys' love and forgiveness by plying them with their favorite foods. From that opening in Fallenberg's ambitious debut, Joseph's life unfolds in retrospect: 20 years earlier, as a married father of five, Joseph discovers he is gay as he falls in love with a charismatic, and married, rabbi. The rabbi kills himself not long after he and Joseph start their affair, and a crushed Joseph, in one fell swoop, jettisons his marriage and adherence to Modern Orthodox Judaism. The familial repercussions are myriad and extreme, leaving Joseph's wife bereft and his sons with issues that range from low self-esteem and lack of trust to fanatical nationalism and religiosity. While Joseph and the rabbi's lovemaking is sentimentalized, and Joseph's and one son's homosexual awakenings seem abrupt, Fallenberg's descriptions of Israeli life, from the rural and academic arenas to the gay milieu, are credible and absorbing. The book adroitly sketches the heartfelt struggles of a sympathetic cast.
Publishers Weekly
Fallenberg (creative writing, Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel), who has translated the works of several renowned Israeli authors, presents his first novel, which takes place in 1996 Tel Aviv on the eve of literature professor Joseph Licht's 50th birthday. As Joseph prepares to reunite with his five sons for the first time in 20 years since he left their mother for a prominent male rabbi, flashbacks enlighten us as to the circumstances of his choice as well as to the characters of his sons, who serve as a bizarre microcosm of Israeli society, ranging from the completely secular to the ultra-Orthodox. After so much buildup, the denouement feels somewhat rushed, and several characters are little more than stereotypes. But Joseph's story, in which he eventually realizes his desires, is a compelling one. Recommended for general fiction collections.
Alicia Korenman - Library Journal
Fallenberg’s smoothly flowing observations of father-son bonds and of love of many kinds resonates on many levels.
Booklist
Love between men-fathers and sons, as well as lovers-binds a sensitive first novel of family reconciliation. Israeli academic Joseph Licht, married with five sons, is shocked to encounter a kindred soul when he meets "young Torah genius" Rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig. The intensity of their love affair compels Licht to forsake his wife Rebecca and their children at the moshav and move to a small apartment in Tel Aviv. But almost immediately Yoel commits suicide. These facts are 20 years in the past when the book opens, on Licht's 50th birthday, as he prepares a meal to which his five sons are invited, coming together for the first time in two decades. Licht has weathered many difficult years since Yoel's death, finally finding happiness with rich Pepe, a crude (but loving) hedonist, in contrast with Yoel's eloquent intellectualism. The father's departure affected his sons differently-Ethan, the army officer, learned to take responsibility early, while Gideon, the ultra-Orthodox Jew, rejects his father's homosexuality as the sin of all sins. After the elaborate meal, Licht unburdens himself, offering the boys his side of the story. Angry eldest son Daniel counters with his account of saving Rebecca from a suicide attempt. But the next day brings a confession, a paternal reprimand, a long-lost suicide note and finally a frank conversation with Daniel that reopens the door to Licht's role in his family's life. Intelligent craftsmanship confined within a theatrical, excessively tidy format.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Which character did you care about most in the story? Which one did you care about least? Why?
2. Did your attitude toward Joseph, Yoel, or Rebecca change as you got to know them? In what ways?
3. Do you think it significant that Joseph’s children were all boys? Do you think a girl might have reacted differently?
4. Near the end of the book, Joseph says, “I made a choice—the most awful, terrifying, sobering choice of my life.” Did he make a well thought out choice when he left home, or did his attraction for Yoel blind him to the consequences and propel him into a course of action he could never have envisaged previously? What choices were made by other characters in the story, and what might this tell us about the role of choice in our own lives?
5. Rebecca seems to have accepted her situation. Could things have turned out differently if she had lashed out instead of nurturing the “snake” inside her?
6. If Joseph had decided to go back to his family after Yoel died—“while we’ll still have you,” as his father said—do you think he could have resumed his former life?
7. On page 50, Yoel says, “…the doubts will creep in, and the guilt. And the guilt will last until the next time we meet, when we have begun to wonder, begun to know, in our separate prisons, that we have crossed a dangerous boundary into a country that demands too much of citizens like us—shame and abhorrence followed by complete repentance, or the shattering of our lives as we know them.” Joseph replies, “Can’t we love one another and God?” Do you think Joseph was naïve in thinking this? Did he truly believe it? How does this reflect their different attitudes to their relationship?
8. Joseph goes to visit Yoel’s widow, assuming she doesn’t know who he is and without even knowing what he's going to say to her. She greets him with the words, “My husband’s lover and assassin,” curses him, and throws him out. Yet Joseph feels“mischievous and daring” when he leaves. Why would this encounter have such an effect on him?
9. Yoel’s conflict is reflected in the way he regards their relationship: on the one hand he considers it “self-interested and hedonistic,” yet in the long letter he wrote to Joseph, treasured through all those years, he says, “It was His intention that we know each other in order to know Him, that our spiritual and physical love is the love He feels for all creation.” What was Joseph’s greatest conflict, both when he left home and in the years that followed?
10. At the “birthday dinner,” Joseph feels he must make the boys “see the unfolding of events through his eyes.” How successful is he in this? Is Joseph trying to convince them that his leaving was actually in their best interests at the time? How does each of the boys come to terms with what Joseph tells them?
11. What role does memory play in the unraveling of the story—Joseph’s memories of his boys as children; his memories of his meetings with Yoel; Daniel’s vivid memory of his mother’s “suicide attempt,” as opposed to his total lack of recollection of their outings with their father; Rebecca’s memories of their family life and of her reaction to Joseph’s leaving?
12. At the end of the book, Joseph says to Daniel, “Sometimes you just have to let go.” What do you think he means?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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